The Bat: The First Inspector Harry Hole Novel

Before Harry took on the neo-Nazi gangs of Oslo, before he met Rakel, before The Snowman tried to take everything he held dear, he went to Australia. Harry Hole is sent to Sydney to investigate the murder of Inger Holter, a young Norwegian girl who was working in a bar. Initially sidelined as an outsider, Harry becomes central to the Australian police investigation when they start to notice a number of unsolved rape and murder cases around the country. The victims were usually young blondes. Inger had a number of admirers, each with his own share of secrets, but there is no obvious suspect.

The Son: A Novel

Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny’s been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don’t know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit - or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he’s serving time for other peoples’ crimes. Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption....

Headhunters

Roger Brown is a corporate headhunter, and he’s a master of his profession. But one career simply can’t support his luxurious lifestyle and his wife’s fledgling art gallery. At an art opening one night he meets Clas Greve, who is not only the perfect candidate for a major CEO job, but also, perhaps, the answer to his financial woes: Greve just so happens to mention that he owns a priceless Peter Paul Rubens painting that’s been lost since World War II - and Roger Brown just so happens to dabble in art theft.

Blood on Snow: A novel

This is the story of Olav: an extremely talented "fixer" for one of Oslo's most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has a capacity for love that is as far-reaching as is his gift for murder. He is our straightforward, calm-in-the-face-of-crisis narrator with a storyteller's hypnotic knack for fantasy. He has an "innate talent for subordination" but running through his veins is a "virus" born of the power over life and death.

Mercy: Department Q, Book 1

The unabridged, digital audiobook edition of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Mercy, Scandinavia’s new bestselling crime phenomenon. Read by the actor Steven Pacey. At first the prisoner scratches at the walls until her fingers bleed. But there is no escaping the room. With no way of measuring time, her days, weeks, months go unrecorded. She vows not to go mad. She will not give her captors the satisfaction.

The Late Show

Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none, as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor. But one night she catches two cases she doesn't want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn.

A Dark So Deadly

Welcome to the Misfit Mob... It's where Police Scotland dumps the officers it can't get rid of but wants to: the outcasts, the troublemakers, the compromised. Officers like DC Callum MacGregor, lumbered with all the boring go-nowhere cases. So when an ancient mummy turns up at the Oldcastle tip, it's his job to find out which museum it's been stolen from. But then Callum uncovers links between his ancient corpse and three missing young men, and life starts to get a lot more interesting.

When It Grows Dark

Stavern, 1983. After a brutal robbery, a young policeman named William Wisting is edged off the investigation by more experienced officers, but soon he is on another case that has not even been recognised as murder. Forgotten in a dilapidated barn stands a bullet-riddled old car, and it looks as if the driver did not get out alive. This case will shape William Wisting as a policeman and give him insight that he will carry with him for the rest of his career.

The Force: A Novel

All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.

I'm Travelling Alone: Holger Munch & Mia Kruger, Book 1

When a six-year-old girl is found dead, hanging from a tree, the only clue the Oslo Police have to work with is an airline tag around her neck. It reads, 'I'm travelling alone'. Holger Munch, veteran police investigator, is immediately charged with reassembling his homicide unit. But to complete the team, he must convince his erstwhile partner, Mia Krüger - a brilliant but troubled investigator - to return from the solitary island where she has retreated with plans to take her own life.

Magpie Murders: A Novel

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the best-selling crime writer for years, she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan's traditional formula has proved hugely successful.

Still Life: Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 1

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it’s a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate.

The Cold, Cold Ground: Detective Sean Duffy, Book 1

Adrian McKinty was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford before moving to America in the early 1990s. Living first in Harlem, he found employment as a construction worker, barman, and bookstore clerk. In 2000 he moved to Denver to become a high school English teacher and it was there that he began writing fiction.

Cold Granite: Logan McRae, Book 1

It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Three-year-old David Reid's body is discovered in a ditch: strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he's only the first. There's a serial killer stalking the Granite City, and the local media are baying for blood. Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die.

Jar City

Gold Dagger Award winner Arnaldur Indridason’s novels featuring Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson became international sensations on their way to selling millions of copies worldwide. The debut of morose detective Sveinsson finds the inspector and his team delving into the murder of a retiree with horrifying secrets.

The Fourth Monkey

Se7en meets The Silence of the Lambs in this dark and twisting novel from the author Jeffery Deaver called "a talented writer with a delightfully devious mind". For over five years, the Four Monkey Killer has terrorized the residents of Chicago. When his body is found, the police quickly realize he was on his way to deliver one final message, one that proves he has taken another victim, who may still be alive.

Rules of Prey: A Lucas Davenport Novel

The "maddog" murderer who is terrorizing the Twin Cities is two things: insane and extremely intelligent. He kills for the pleasure of it and thoroughly enjoys placing elaborate obstacles to keep police befuddled. Each clever move he makes is another point of pride. But when the brilliant Lieutenant Lucas Davenport, a dedicated cop and a serial killer's worst nightmare, is brought in to take up the investigation, the maddog suddenly has an adversary worthy of his genius.

Publisher's Summary

Harry Hole returns - or does he? - in a terrifyingly paced, vertiginous new roller coaster of a thriller by the internationally best-selling author of The Snowman and The Redeemer, "the king of Scandinavian crime fiction" (Kirkus).

The police urgently need Harry Hole…. A killer is stalking Oslo's streets. Police officers are being slain at the scenes of crimes they once investigated but failed to solve. The murders are brutal, the media reaction hysterical.

But this time, Harry can't help.... For years, detective Harry Hole has been at the center of every major criminal investigation in Oslo. His dedication to his job and his brilliant insights have saved the lives of countless people. But now, with those he loves most facing terrible danger, Harry is not in a position to protect anyone.

I assume, if you are reading this review, that you are familiar with the Harry Hole detective series.

If not, go back and get started with "The Bat". There is no noir like Nordic noir, and Jo Nesbo writes great Nordic noir. In my opinion, he is the best of the surprisingly large and productive group of modern, Scandinavian mystery writers,

But if you are familiar with the Harry Hole series, proceed at you own risk. From an aesthetic perspective, the series should end with "The Phantom". By the end of that novel, Nesbo has wrought a Grecian tragedy and brought it to a perfect denouement. Unfortunately Nesbo, like Harry Hole, cannot stop, even when he knows he should; the result is a bit of a hangover.

I thought I had beat Harry in figuring out who was the murderer, but not why. Turns out I was right ... but there's more to the story. Kudos to Jo Nesbo for such a thriller and such a puzzler, ... even up to the second-last chapter I was still questioning whether I had it right. And, it was only in the last chapter that Nesbo makes all the pieces fall into place.

Their have been several narrators and few different pronunciations of Harry's last name in this series. One constant has been the high quality of the stories. If you have read the preceding books, you will expect to be played with as Jo Nesbo leads you down several different paths as we try to figure out who the serial killer of police personnel is. I made the mistake of telling my daughter who had already listened to the book who I knew had to be the murderer. She didn't verbally give anything away - but the look in her eye told me a lot - amateur detective and deep reader into people's expressions (when they are related to me) that I am.

So I knew my hunch was incorrect. But that is okay, because later on even Harry Hole was convinced that he knew who the killer was and was wrong as well. Our dependable brilliant detective planned to take justice into his own hands to avenge the loss of a dear friend on the wrong murderer.

There are a lot of layers to this story and it feels like Nesbo has an ear for authenticity in the messy world of capturing despicable criminals. You won't like everything that happens in this book. You won't be pleased with the ending. But there is an uplifting scene near the end that makes everything worthwhile. Kind of like real life, which is not always a fairy tale, but there are times that soar in our souls. Most of us would be bored with a perfect detective in a perfect world. This book is certainly not boring. Now, I am already committed to listening to book eleven in the Harry Hole universe.

I see it is called "The Thirst" and has a new narrator - I wonder how this guy is going to pronounce Harry's last name.

I've read most of the Harry Hole books despite a growing sense that the series -- like Harry Hole himself -- is growing tiresome and less interesting over time. Nonetheless I've kept coming back, hoping that I would find myself once again engaged in the characters and story. In this book Nesbo indulges in detailed and excessively repulsive descriptions of violence and torture, almost as if he wants to see just how far he can push the reader's sense of fear, loathing, and disgust for no other purpose than to test his considerable ability as a writer. For me at least, this exercise served no purpose. I resorted to skipping over whole passages that were bogged down in such description. To make matters worse the plot is convoluted and contrived. In an effort to deliver the customary twist in the conclusion Nesbo seems to throw everything at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. I finished this book with no interest in reading another Harry Hole book.

If you’ve listened to books by Jo Nesbø before, how does this one compare?

Harry Hole was missing in action most of the time.

Did John Lee do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

Okay.

Could you see Police being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

No. Not this book.

Any additional comments?

I was surprised at this book. I think he just wrote it as a filler for the money. It's like he didn't take the time. If he's going to put the Harry Hole brand on it, then let him write a Harry Hole novel.

He read the book as if it were some kind of children's story. His voice was way too animated. Harry Hole is a dark character and the reading should reflect that. I suggest Mr. Lee listen to Robin's reading of the Hole stories to see how "less" can be so much "more." I found myself losing the storyline because his reading was so singsongy.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, because I wanted to know what happened.

Any additional comments?

This is the first Harry Hole audiobook that has made me wish I'd read a hard copy of the book rather than listen to the audiobook. Perhaps I'm just too accustomed to Robin Sachs' characterizations. Robin Sachs is greatly missed. May he RIP.